


So Many Things Unknown

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Mantis knows, somehow, that they won't be stuck in this world forever.(Because Infinity War needed to be fixed, afterlife reunions are my thing, and Mantis needs a hug.)





	1. Awakening

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time I've ever written a fanfiction for an audience larger than one of my friends, and while I know, intellectually, that posting this is *not a thing,* it feels like a Very Big Deal on account of a weird self-consciousness I associate with writing fanfic. This, then, is both my response to the emotional trauma of Infinity War and an attempt to conquer my fear of fanfic. A friend once told me never to hold back from sharing my writing just because someone out there was better at it than I was, and I’ve decided to take that advice; that being said, take that as a warning that this may not be of the quality you are used to seeing (the talent level of this website is insane). I hope you like it anyways, but if not, please be gentle - I am, as I said, inexperienced.
> 
> (Title is from "In My Life" from Les Miserables, because what better to title an Infinity War fix-it with than a reference to another classic "all my friends are dead" story?)

Mantis jolted into consciousness with a distinctly sharp pain in her temples, unaware of her location, feeling nothing but an intense wave of emotion, piercing like a loud noise in her head.

She shook her head, trying to shake off whatever this was. Blinking, she attempted to clear her vision, but it did little good; all she saw was an orange glow. She stood, the translucent nothingness beneath her feet moving like water, and yet it was still. She toed the strange substance, watching for the ripple that didn’t come. There was something distinctly discomforting about the otherworldly atmosphere of it all.

The thought had scarcely begun to cross her mind why she might be here in the first place when Mantis' antennae raised, jolting her out of her thoughts. She first thought she may have been hearing things, made paranoid by the suspicion that she might be…well, she didn’t want to think about it...but mere seconds later she was quite sure she'd heard the faint sounds of footsteps behind her. Suspicious, she turned tentatively, both hoping for a companion in this watery orange desert and fearing the face she’d find upon turning.

Her first instinct, it seemed, had been the right one, and her antennae relaxed as her eyes came to focus on the disgruntled face of the only sentient plant she’d ever met.

“Groot!” She exclaimed, ready to cry with relief. “I am so relieved that it is you! I thought I was alone here and when I heard you, I was sure you we-“

“I am _Groot_ ,” the adolescent muttered, clearly not interested in anything his companion was saying, or anything but his most pressing question at the moment.

“No, I do not know where we are. I was hoping that you would?” Mantis smiled nervously in a clearly feigned expression of the thing people called “confidence.” She had heard it was good for making others feel as if one had a situation under control, which she judged to be an excellent impression to make in a situation like this one. _He must not know that he is dead,_  she decided. _That information would only cause him further distress. I must be calm..._

“I am Groot.”

“No, have you?”

Only with that question did the thought cross her mind that, if she and her disagreeable floral friend were here in this strange...afterlife, for lack of a better word, so should be the rest of their team, and their new allies. But she had not seen any of them. “Perhaps we should look for them?”

“I _am_ Groot…”

“You make a valid point," she conceded. It would be exceedingly difficult to locate their friends in this orange void. “But we need to try!” She straightened her back. _Confidence, Mantis! You must make them believe that the situation is in control…_

“I am Groot.”

“Or we could wait for them to come to us,” she acquiesced. It was certainly simpler that way. “That is also a possibility.”

“IAmGroot,” the teenager replied briskly, promptly running off with his gaming console – _how did that survive if we did not?_ – to who-knows-where, clearly wishing to be left to, literally, rest in peace.

Mantis, for one, was not quite so comfortable with the fact that she was, for the moment, ... _dead? Or something?_  Unsure what to think, she sat against nothing, sighing heavily and kicking at the strange ground, some strange medium between liquid and solid. This was going to require some thought, she was sure.

It did not take much.

As before, answers seemed to present themselves to her. To its credit, this place seemed to be quite nice in delivering the help necessary for its inhabitants to figure out how they had ended up there. This time its hint came in the form of a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of a familiar emerald face somewhere in the distant vicinity; almost bursting into tears of relief, Mantis had never found her rather intimidating teammate more welcoming.

“Gamora! I am so glad to see you,” she cried out, causing her to turn. “Do you know-what is-where-“

Gamora's flinty expression softened slightly at the sight of Mantis’ genuine relief to see her, only to darken again.

“You, too?” She muttered, shaking her head.

“You mean, that I am…” Mantis began cautiously, unsure of the proper way to proceed. She tapered off, judging it best not to continue.

“You weren’t supposed to be here. None of you were,” Gamora replied, risking a tiny glance off into the distance as she approached her teammate.

“We were not supposed to be…where?”

“Here.”

“Where is...'here'?” Mantis asked again, doubly confused.

“Inside the Soul Stone,” she explained. “It’s like…a prison, in a way. All of those who are killed by the stone, directly or indirectly, are...stored here, it seems.”

“How do you know?” Mantis inquired.

Gamora shrugged weightedly. “Instinct, maybe. It’s like I knew it by default as soon as I saw this place.” Lacking further words, her gaze retreated to the ground, full of thoughts Mantis couldn't help wondering about. Maybe what she needed was somewhere in that look - it was certainly the sort of expression one could find answers in. Too curious to restrain herself any longer, rested her palm on Gamora’s forearm. She had an idea as to what she was feeling, but she wanted to be sure.

Under any other circumstances, that gesture would have been met with a broken jaw, but this time, Gamora didn’t resist, and Mantis felt the telltale surge of her emotions as they were transmitted to her. Everything about Gamora felt foggy, as if nothing was immediately clear. “You feel…confusion,” she concluded. “You do not know how to explain what you are feeling.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Gamora muttered. _More like_  ' _and maybe I don't want to,'_ Mantis thought. 

The fogginess of her feelings began to burn off, and Mantis felt a burst of utter loneliness. Secondhand tears pricked at her eyes. “And you feel alone.”

“I wouldn’t be too alarmed, seeing as this place is deserted,” she replied wearily.

“You feel loss,” she continued, ignoring Gamora's attempts to play off her obvious grief. “Of your friends…your family. You miss them. You feel…lost without them. You feel betrayed.”

She didn’t want to say the name that hung over both of their minds.

“Of course I do,” she barely whispered, staring unhappily into nothingness. That alone would get Mantis' attention on any given day – Gamora’s displays of vulnerability were few and far between – but now it hit like a knife as the empath could feel, as if it were her own, the depth of her pain.

“You do not want to be here, do you?” She asked, drawing the only conclusion she reasonably can.

"Of course I don’t,” Gamora snaps, closer to tears than Mantis had ever seen her. “But that isn’t exactly within my control.”

“You are frustrated,” Mantis finished, softening her expression in what she hoped was a sympathetic gesture.

“It’s a common feeling in people who’ve just lost everything,” Gamora responded almost stoically, betraying as little as she could. Mantis was rather surprised that she had not yet recognized the futility of hiding one's feelings from an empath, but she did not mention it.

"I can...take your grief away," she offered; the solution to her friend's heartache at her fingertips if she wished, had been the whole time. 

"No. Absolutely not," Gamora responded definitively, shaking her head furiously. "It would be heartless to forget it at a time like this." 

Unsurprised but somehow still taken aback by her friend's firmness of opinion ( _since when does she care about having a heart?),_ Mantis tried again. 

“I have heard that it is good to comfortingly touch people who are frustrated,” Mantis offered. “Would you like a hug?”

She knew it was a long shot, perhaps a surefire way to end up seriously injured, but she still wished to try. Gamora may have turned down her first offer, but Mantis had seen many others who lacked her capabilities comfort their loved ones before, in their own way. Surely she could do the same.

Gamora almost smiled, and Mantis felt as if an immense wave of relief had washed over her. “Two weeks ago I would have broken your nose for that,” she huffed, but it was not an outright denunciation. 

Mantis still thought it vastly preferable, though, to err on the side of caution.  

“Does that mean that you would not like to be hugged?” Mantis asked, slightly reassured that her efforts had not been grievously offensive but not entirely confident.

“It means that I’ll make an exception.”

Mantis half-smiled as she awkwardly wrapped her arms around her friend in a scared imitation of the gesture she'd seen so many others exchange, and all she could feel was loss, and loneliness, and the far-off strains of a song she knew she’d heard a thousand times before.  

_Of course._

Mantis was unsure why it had taken her so long to figure it out. Losing her teammates was one blow. Losing the love of her life was another. She'd tried to conceal it but it was bound to show eventually. Now she could clearly see that there was one loss Gamora mourned above the others. 

“You feel...longing?” Mantis probed, ever so cautiously. "For...someone you love." 

Gamora initially shot her a look warning that she was seconds away from killing her a second time, but it quickly faded to a hopeless expression that scared Mantis more than any death stare ever had.

Totally unsure of the proper way to respond, Mantis panicked.

“I am-I-I’m sure that we can f-find the others somewhere in here!” She sputtered, thinking of neither a beginning or an ending for the thought she was trying to verbalize. “Peter has to be here, somewhere, I am sure-“

“That’s worse than the alternative.”

“ _Oh.”_

Now she understood.

“Maybe,” Mantis begun again, collecting her thoughts more carefully this time, “if we find everybody, we can find a way to-escape? You said we’re in the-“

“Soul Stone,” Gamora repeated.

“Yes, the Soul Stone. Is there a way to free ourselves?”

“Don’t you think I would have tried that already if there was one?’ Gamora sighed.

“Well, yes, but maybe there is one that you do not know about!” Mantis countered in a voice far too bright for the circumstances.

“Maybe.”

That was enough for her. “Then we’re going to find one!” Mantis insisted. _Confidence is key, no?_

To the greatest extent that it could, it worked.

Gamora shook her head rather fondly, and when Mantis wandered off aimlessly in a random direction, not sure exactly where she was trying to go but quixotically convinced that there had to be some way to find their friends in this orange haystack, she followed.

It was a start, and it wasn’t as if they had much to lose even if the search amounted to nothing.


	2. Reunion

Mantis was unsure how time elapsed in this…whatever it was, but she was certain that she and Gamora had been searching for their teammates for hours.

Demoralizing, then, that they’d found nothing. Groot, of course, had long since disappeared, cavorting off to who-knows-where with his gaming device and conveniently pretending that nothing that had occurred in the past week had affected him – anyone could tell it had – and the others were nowhere to be found.

“Does this world make it hard to find people on purpose?” Mantis inquired. “Are we supposed to be alone?”

Gamora shrugged. “There's no way to know, but I doubt it’s intentional or we wouldn’t be seeing each other.”

“People disappear so fast here,” she mused. “I wonder why? Where do they go?”

“You ask too many questions," Gamora huffed.

Mantis’ antennae drooped, and she shuffled along noiselessly for a few minutes.

“Actually, keep talking. It’s an effective distraction,” Gamora recanted after several moments of complete silence. Mantis nodded and began to say anything that occurred to her - anything at all, whether it made sense or was relevant or not – because she knew why Gamora had requested it, and if there was anything Mantis understood, it was the terror of being left alone with your thoughts.

“I hope that I am not a tiresome companion,” she said after a slight pause in a speech about the merits of some strange food she’d tried a while back. She knew her conversation had been requested, but she did not wish to irritate her friends. Especially not this one. And especially not then, when everyone had been through so much.

“No, I did ask,” Gamora assured her. “It helps. Gets my mind off of things.”

Mantis later recalled that that may have been the first time Gamora admitted that there was anything to get her mind off of. _This afterlife is very strange,_ she thought. _It is making Gamora talk openly about feelings. I wonder if she is being manipulated?_

They had been wandering for a time seeing nothing – no landmark, no other sign of company for miles around. It was, Mantis had to admit, unceasingly dull. But she forced herself to keep up the chipper masquerade. She thought that it might boost morale. It didn’t seem to be working, but it seemed unfair not to at least try. Gamora deserved as much after the week she’d had. But one thing had begun to weigh on her.

“Where are we?” She asked, still seeing absolutely nothing but orange.

“I think it’s all the same,” Gamora sighed, clearly not buying into Mantis’ efforts to lighten the mood. She said nothing, only walking on and on and on and on until a flicker of movement caught her eye in the distance. She pointed it out.

“That seems to be someb-“ She started. Gamora clearly saw the same thing and immediately stopped short, and Mantis did not need to see anything more to know that they’d aimlessly stumbled into the right place. _Our luck is truly remarkable,_ she thought.

They both froze, Gamora weakly calling, “…is that you?”

Peter didn’t need to hear his name to know it was him she called to, and exactly who was calling and why and where he was and – He turned. Mantis saw Gamora’s eyes widen, filling with tears, almost beginning to go to him before stopping herself again, for reasons Mantis did not understand. For a while the two simply stood, perhaps thirty feet apart, saying nothing and staring across the distance at each other as if they were not sure of the reliability of their eyesight.

And then she broke into a run, and they were in each other’s arms, and Mantis could not hear everything they were saying, but she knew from the way their shoulders shook that both were crying, and she thought she heard a faint “I love you” and she knew they both said something to the effect of “I thought I’d lost you” and “I’m here” and repeated it until they both finally believed it was really happening, and something inside her felt suddenly warm and whole.

She had seen her share of unfair endings in the last couple of days. Untold numbers of young, gifted, and truly good people had been taken long before their times. Countless others had lost the ones they held dearest, some forced to watch. The future of the universe looked rather bleak; half of her friends were trapped in some sort of afterlife in a rock that had started a war, and the rest were scattered across the cosmos. But she knew, in that moment, that it would not stay this way. They would find a way out of here, and they’d stop this and make everything right again. Mantis was surer of this than she had been of anything before. Optimistic, perhaps, she knew; but she felt this time that her instinct could not be proven wrong.

This, too, would pass.

It had to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this isn't exactly a fix-it ending, as everyone is still dead, but it's at least supposed to set up a happy ending, which I'm sure your minds can easily supply. (Admit it, we've all got an IW fix-it theory floating around somewhere in our brains...) That said, I hope you enjoyed this.


End file.
